 the energy man on Think Tech Hawai'i, Stan Osserman here, coming to you live and direct from North Kona, Hawaii, on the island of Hawaii, courtesy of Blue Planet Research. And Hank Rogers has allowed me to broadcast from this facility here, which is really helpful. And Paul Pontio, who's my guest today, is going to be on here shortly, but I wanted to start off with just a little bit of the genesis of this particular show. A couple of years ago, I had a guest on named Professor Nate Huggins, or Hagan's, from, I believe it was Minnesota. Now, he had a business background, and he was a financial guy on Wall Street. And he moved back to the Midwest to be a farmer and to teach at the university there. And he really kind of focused on energy. His main subjects were sociology-type subjects with his students. He'd get them to learn about the real world, the real world of finances, the real world of energy, and things like that. Well, his first slide that he brought up was a really interesting picture. He had his horse, a quad, his pickup truck, and a picture of him, all out in the field on his farm. And I said, so, Nate, what's the deal with the picture? And he says, then the subject of our discussion is going to be energy blindness. Virtually every human being in the United States and most people on the planet have no idea how much energy they use. And I told him, well, I know how much energy my house uses. He goes, well, you mean how much your bill is? I go, no, I use 21 kilowatt hours a day at my house. And he goes, you're one of the few people that could actually answer that question, Stan. Nobody really thinks about how many kilowatt hours a day that they use in their house. And that's really important. People are just totally ignoring the energy that it takes to run our society nowadays. He says, I'll give you an example. If you had three friends and you jumped in your car and did a road trip for 400 miles, so you lived on the mainland and you just wanted to do this road trip. So you guys went about 400 miles. And then all of a sudden, you know, you were low on gas and you pulled into a gas station and there was no gas. And then the attendant said, there's no gas for 300 miles around us. You guys are just out of luck, your vacation's over. And so now they were stuck because they all had to go back to work. And the only way to get their car, which was still needed, you know, they set a loan on it, was to push it. So here's the math. 400 miles, pushing it at two miles an hour is 200 hours worth of pushing. At 10 hours a day, that's 20 days to get their car back home for a trip that only took maybe five hours to get the 400 miles that they started off on. So five hours with gasoline or 20 days of pushing a car 10 hours a day with three guys pushing and one guy steering, that's energy awareness. And it's a real picture that we're just missing today. Today's society, we're seriously underappreciating how much energy dependent we are and how much we really do use and how valuable the fuel really is. And as a result, a lot of the folks today, they don't really have a serious, well thought out plan for how we're going to get into the future. And so I have a note here to myself that a bad plan is worse than no plan at all. And the Green New Deal is a very bad plan. We cannot just stop using oil cold turkey when energy costs spike, the cost of everything spikes. So if you start limiting the amount of fossil fuels we use before we have a replacement plan going to bring ourselves into a green energy sector, we're really hurting ourselves because it starts to drive up the cost of everything, including the transition to clean energy. Solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, batteries, everything needs oil to be manufactured nowadays. And if you cut off the oil first and then try and make your transition to clean energy, you have a real problem being started. So here in Hawaii, a bunch of us have been thinking about how we could be a model for the world in Hawaii to turn us into a clean energy, but with a real plan. So we need a transition plan that government policies support and that the funding to accomplish it is really realistic, it's available. So like I mentioned, my guest today is Paul Ponteo. He's the Corporate Technology Officer here at Blue Planet Research. And he and I do a lot of work together on trying to come up with this plan with a gentleman named Yuen from the University of Hawaii on how we can get Hawaii to be the model for clean energy across the planet. So Paul, welcome to the show today. I really appreciate you hosting me here, not just joining me, but giving me a place to broadcast from. And we've got a picture we'd like to throw up there, too. And I'll let you explain what this picture is, Paul. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to be in the show. So what we're looking at right now is a picture of our Toyota Mirai, which is a hydrogen fuel cell EV. And on the right side is David Howard Donald's brand new first in Hawaii, all electric tractor. So this was kind of a we stage this as kind of a first date of these two vehicles meeting each other. All right. Yeah, that's that Mirai is the only hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the island of Hawaii and the tractors only electric tractor on the island of Hawaii. So it's a pretty rare photo. It's the same tractor that Jack Johnson has on a lot. So there are two of them in Hawaii now. OK, what I'd like to do, Paul, is we talked a little bit about trying to be the model for the world and getting the world to look at Hawaii as an example of how we could use renewable energy to really make the transition and make it in a realistic way. But to start off with, let's talk about. Basically, what I see right now is we're trying to work on the grid, but we're kind of ignoring transportation, which uses more fuel than the grid in most cases. So if we want to really talk about the end state of what we're going to be doing in 10 years from now, it's going to be electric transportation and an electric grid all running off renewable. But that's a serious, serious challenge. So can you kind of frame that discussion? Like if we start off with, first of all, how are we going to get to all renewable energy on the grid? And then we'll talk about how we plug in electricity into the transportation sector. It all kind of boils down to what Chip Cummins said. And I still wish and use it over and over that there's no silver bullet that's going to solve these problems of climate change or energy crisis. But, you know, there's silver buckshot and we really have to use everything available and all of the resources that are available now through this, what is probably going to be a very long transition period to move off of fossil fuels. But a lot of people don't realize is that, you know, electric cars are great. But every time you plug an electric car into the grid, it's like adding two and a half houses. Tesla's cars have about a 90 kilowatt hour battery. The average house in America uses about 30 kilowatt hours a day. So that's three houses right there. We have a Nissan Leaf that's 60 kilowatt hours. So that's two houses. So the big issue is how do you make the infrastructure support that lofty goal of going full electric mobility on transportation? And when people ask me about my definition of sustainability, it is definitely three things. We have to have food security, agriculture. We have to take care of transportation and we have to take care of energy. So they go hand in hand on a lot of different levels. But going electric is a serious challenge. It's not just about putting up more solar panels and batteries. The actual distribution infrastructure is that's the weak point. So this is where hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles come in to help make that model work in the places where the grid can't support that. We can go to the classic gas station model of using hydrogen fueling stations and people can live in a condo and apartment house and still be able to drive an electric vehicle that way. So we need all of that to make it work. So you're right. We need all that silver buckshot to solve these problems. So the first thing we have to do is figure out how much electricity we need to generate from clean sources and what those clean sources might be. So in Hawaii, we're really fortunate. We got plenty of sunlight. We're near the equator, so we get more sunlight than the continental US year round because we get long days and long nights with a lot of sunshine. We have nice trade winds that can blow wind turbines. We have underwater currents that can push undersea turbines. We have geothermal power and we even have hydroelectric power from some of our rivers and streams that flow downhill. So we can make electricity, but how much electricity are we really talking about? So I pulled up some data from the Department of Energy, the US Department of Energy. And, you know, we have one major electric company in the state and then one co-op utility on the island of Kauai. And combined, they have to produce 10.5 terawatts of power. So what's that all, like one million or excuse me, 1,000 gigawatts of power? It's it's a lot of power. So so I sat down and said, you know, using kind of Paul's example, I said, well, if everybody used about 20 to 21 kilowatt hours a day per person times the 1.4 million people that live here, that equals 28.75 gigawatts of electricity every day, which equals 10.5 terawatts of power a year. So that's just without electric transportation. You throw in Paul's two and a half times or so the amount of energy you need. And that takes us to 26.25 terawatts of electricity that we're going to have to create from renewable sources here in the state of Hawaii. And as far as I'm concerned, we probably should be using a little bit of geothermal. I mean, a little bit of hydroelectric and the solar. And, you know, but we're going to probably have to depend a lot on geothermal and maybe ocean currents and underwater turbines. Wind power, we've tried it here and it's not real popular. So I'm not sure how much we're really going to get from wind power. But, you know, Paul, right now, I mean, I don't deal a whole lot with the electric electric company or electric grid. And here on the big island, it's it's a fairly small. We've got like four hundred and something thousand people here, if I remember right. About how much power is the big island capable of generating under its current? Its current structure. Although the current structure are typical loads, about 180 megawatts for the big island. So to increase that, the infrastructure would definitely have to be increased at the same time. Unfortunately, the picture you're painting is not equal across all islands, just because we're all in Hawaii doesn't mean that every island has the same available resources. It's actually a very disparate situation where the largest island, Hawaii Island, has the least amount of people, but we have the largest landmass to be able and resources for renewable energy. Oahu, for example, where it's the densest population, has the smallest landmass compared to its population. And they're going to struggle to try to generate enough renewable electricity. So this is where the big island can come in to play to help the entire state, because we can produce enormous amounts of hydrogen that can be shipped to all the other islands to help support that grid by using more fuel cell electric vehicles for transportation, for both personal transportation, especially trucking and shipping and eventually aviation. It's going to be key. So Paul, some of our friends are just really sold on batteries. Do you think that it's even possible to have battery barges to ship all that energy from the big island to Oahu? No, it's definitely not possible. Right now, you know, trucking, for example, to go over Saddle Road from Hilo to Kailua or vice versa takes quite a bit of energy, especially when you're pushing a track classic tractor with a big 40 foot rig on the back. And batteries simply just can't really do it well. The problem with batteries and, you know, I think batteries are great. And they're certainly part of the buckshot. Most of the work I do surrounds batteries and hydrogen. The problem we have is that batteries can to like to drive on fairly flat level ground most of the time or be able to regen coming back down the hill. But they don't like temperature extremes. So luckily in Hawaii, we don't have to deal with that aspect of it. But, for example, if you go up Saddle Road in a BEV, a battery electric vehicle, as the battery starts to work harder, it starts to heat up, the resistance goes up and the energy gets used up much quicker. And I can give you a great example of a test that we did. We took a Toyota Mirai fuel cell electric vehicle. We took a Model X Tesla and a Nissan Leaf, all up Saddle Road for 10 miles at the steepest grade. The Mirai used 19 miles worth of hydrogen to go 10 miles. The Leaf took almost 55 miles to go 10 miles. And the Model X Tesla used 35 miles to go 10 miles. Now, where batteries have an advantage is on the regen because they have more reservoir to put the energy back into. The fuel cell car doesn't make hydrogen on the way down. It charges its very small battery. So depending on the mission profile, one could be better than the other. And certainly for continuing climbing or an extreme weather cold, fuel cells are going to outperform batteries. But for other applications, other missions, batteries, batteries are fantastic. If you can charge them from renewable energy. And the other thing that's a real big misconception in the electric world is that batteries are very, very clean technologies. And they're simply not depending on how you charge it. That's one thing. The other is the manufacturing and the components, especially the cobalt chemistries, kind of take away from that greenness that everyone wants to see in a battery. Fuel cells, I think, overall are a little bit cleaner from cradle to graves. You know, like you say, Paul, we and what we also don't think about is just the sheer spies of our transportation network. So, for example, on the road today, what, maybe 2% of the cars on the road today are electric. And yet, if we got the other 98% of the road, how soon will you run out of cobalt, maybe even run out of lithium just making that many batteries? Where if we had fuel cell technology, use a smaller battery and a fuel cell instead of solid battery packs to be all your power for your electric vehicle? Is that correct? I believe so. I mean, there's a limitation to everything. But, you know, we know battery technology will continue to evolve. It'll use less scarce material resources, eventually, hopefully. But the thing is that batteries will never, ever be able to come close to the energy density of hydrogen. Hydrogen can be as much as 250 times more energy dense than lithium batteries. It's the conversion and the making of the hydrogen. Those inefficiencies take away a bunch. But still, you know, what people really care about with an electric vehicle or a vehicle period is how long will it take me to recharge or re-seal it and how far is it going to go? So the inefficiencies of making hydrogen and converting it through a fuel cell, no one's going to care. It's just it's an irrelevant part of the equation and it's not the metric you want to focus on. And again, we need them both. And for anyone to think that one is better than the other is just being foolish because they have different mission profiles. That's all. Yeah, I think there's actually quite a few differences between battery and fuel cell. We do need both of them, but they both have certain homes where they seem to fit better. Like I see battery plug-in vehicles fitting more in the urban setting than in the rural setting or like you say in a hilly setting. And then, you know, you mentioned that the temperature issue on the mainland, there are some places in the wintertime get down to minus 20, minus 30. You know, Fargo North Dakota gets down pretty darn cold in the wintertime for several months like we used to joke about them only having two weeks of summer. You know, when you have a really cold climate and the batteries cold soap, what kind of performance do you get out of the battery in those conditions? And give it a really a really simple, recent example of that. So Hank Rogers rented a Tesla Model X in New York to go to Virginia to visit his father. And it was in January. So instead of getting the 200 plus miles that the Tesla is rated at, it got a little less than 100 miles. So he constantly had to pull into a supercharger and drink bad coffee for an hour. So trying to get another 40 or 50 miles of charge. So had that been a fuel cell for that particular mission, he could have filled up in five minutes and gone 300 miles or so. So it just depends on the application and the location that you're trying to use each particular technology. And there's also a lot of talk about not just cars and trucks. And of course, you mentioned how how the trucks, especially class A big trucks, if you want to run a long distance like they were, they typically run 800 to 1000 miles before refueling. And if you want to do that with an electric truck, you're going to have to carry so many batteries that you actually have to decrease your cargo capacity to carry just the batteries that are going to get you that 800 to 1000 miles. Or you're going to have to go with less batteries and stop every five to seven hours to recharge your batteries to go the next the next distance. And, you know, that's that's not very efficient. And here in Hawaii, we have a real strange scenario where we have airliners that come in from Japan or from Europe and even from the mainland and they have to buy fuel here in Hawaii. And airplanes, if you look at Airbus, Airbus is promised to have three airplanes on the market by 2035 that run on hydrogen. Now, whether that's liquid hydrogen or ammonia hydrogen or just pressurized hydrogen, they haven't specified that they're serious about it. And they've already dedicated a platform to testing those engines. But when it comes to aircraft, Hawaii is going to have to supply hydrogen to aviation and probably at some point even to shipping because the shipping cargo ships burn more fossil fuel and pollute more than just about anything else that we have in the transportation sector on the planet. So Hawaii is going to have to have a way of supplying hydrogen to parts of the aviation and the maritime industry probably within the next 10 years. And then certainly after that, probably more and more. So what do you think why these options are for making that scale large scale liquid hydrogen, ammonia or whatever to supply for aviation and for shipping? Yeah, I think we only have one real option to be able to get to that scale. And that's going to be geothermal even and biomass as well. Biomass is is a base load type of power 24 seven. And that's what you really need to make hydrogen. You need base load power and geothermal is absolutely the holy grail for making hydrogen in the tonnage that we're talking about. So we're not talking kilograms and we're talking tons of hydrogen. Right. So to to look at that picture, we're kind of looking at Hawaii as a model for for a lot of places in the world, because a lot of them have geothermal power. Japan is geothermal. The Western United States for certain has geothermal. There's communities, of course, in Alaska and the Pacific Rim, the whole the whole ring around the Pacific is called the Ring of Fire because of the geothermal resources available. So many Pacific Islands, including New Zealand, who already does a lot in geothermal Australia and many other places could definitely take advantage of geothermal power to produce energy. And then the energy can be in batteries or be turned into hydrogen for a multitude of uses. And when you're making hydrogen, you're also from green hydrogen from electrolyzers, you're also making oxygen. You have the potential to make ammonia for fertilizer and things like that. Right now, most of our ammonia and I mean, most of our fertilizer in the world is made from natural gas because it's cheap. But most of the countries that make it are slowly starting to run out of natural gas and they're restricting sales of ammonia. So even for the agriculture you talked about for food security at the beginning, you need to have the agriculture and hydrogen production is a good way to also produce stuff for your agricultural, your transportation and your grid storage and moving energy like between the islands, as you mentioned. Yeah, transporting hydrogen in liquefied form is probably the most common way to do bulk movement of hydrogen over distance. Another thing people don't really think about when they think about geothermal, they think about the big island only. And, you know, all the islands have some geothermal resources, just a matter of how much and how much it takes to get to it. But Maui, for example, even some of the other islands, if you drill deep enough, you're probably going to hit a warm resource. But the big island has the largest potential of renewable energy for all of those technologies, especially geothermal. So it's where we should be focusing our efforts to actually expand the scale of hydrogen production to supply the whole. So I ran an end here. I just remembered I pulled up some statistics on our population just so people can get a picture of how our state is. Our state has about one point four million people, which for a state is relatively small. I mean, Los Angeles is multi millions of people just as a city. But on in our state, almost a million of that one point four million live on the island of Oahu, which is Honolulu proper and our downtown Honolulu and our Campbell Industrial Park. All of our heavy power draws around the island of Oahu. The big island is the next most populated with one hundred and eighty six thousand seven hundred and thirty eight. Maui has one hundred and forty four thousand four hundred and forty four. The island of Kauai, which I mentioned, has their own co-op for their power and most of it's renewable. They're actually doing a great example on how to be renewable. They only have sixty six thousand nine hundred twenty one people. And then the remaining populated islands in the state are Molokai with seven thousand three hundred Lanai with three thousand one hundred and Nihao, which is a private island, has one hundred and seventy people. And they don't even have electricity. They have a couple buildings that are wired and a generator. But it's it's probably the smallest microgrid on the state. I think Paul, your microgrid is bigger than the one on Nihao. And so we do have a we're big enough to be a challenge with renewable energy, but we're small enough and and have the kind of test bed, I would call it, that would be perfect for showing different places in the world how they could use the different kinds of renewable energy, the different kinds of battery powered and hydrogen fuel cell in transportation for energy storage, for shipping energy. I think we make that we're potentially one of the best places to showcase hydrogen and renewable energy. So are you on the same page there, Paul? A little bit. I think I think you've nailed it. That's where we need to go. Microgrids make so much more sense than trying to do a giant central grid technology. And the biggest thing that we have available now that didn't exist in 15 even 20 years ago is that the technology now is available to do all this and to do it really well and to do it cost effectively. And that's the key to be able to to make it work and make it work for every day. Right. We talked a little bit before the show about some of the biggest threats to electric grids. And in Hawaii, it's mostly hurricanes and, you know, heavy wind storms, which topple trees, which power lines would take which take out a lot of our infrastructure, sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for a couple of weeks, occasionally, like in Puerto Rico, when they got hit by the two hurricanes those months, because if your infrastructure is seriously damaged, transformers and substations, it's an awful lot of work to get a grid stood back up. So where you have urban populations may be more suitable for traditional grid, like on a Wahoo, but where you can afford to have rural populations on their own microgrids, it makes you more survivable. And and we've already shown that those kind of microgrids can can work with the right amount of battery and hydrogen for long term storage. They work quite well. And that's that is really the key. What you just said is that you really have to combine the two technologies in the right way to get the the optimal system for it to perform well and also to have that backup. You know, batteries are great for your immediate energy release and turnover daily. And then anything that is considered backup power or long term storage, that should be done with hydrogen. It's way more economical. They don't sell discharge and virtually last forever. So it makes more sense when you combine the two like like we do here, we have a combination of batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. I think that is the the most resilient that you can possibly get for for any type of condition. As long as we get hit by a giant rock from space. OK, well, I think that trumps everything pretty much. But Paul, thanks for being on the show today and maybe next week we can get David with his tractor and to talk about some of the agricultural options with renewable energy. I think that'll work. Yeah, I think he'd be real happy to describe his model for the coffee farm and agriculture of the future. Terrific. I'd like to thank everybody for joining us today and thank Paul and Blue Planet Research for hosting us on the show. And we'll see you next week on Stand Energy Map. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.